Virtualization

Windows Sandbox – unable to run .NET apps

I have just updated my daily used computer to Windows 10 1903 May 2019 Update. The update took a while but after all finished with some nice new cool features on board.

I gave it a try and started the new Windows Sandbox mode, which is an out-of-the-box sandbox built in Windows 10 Pro and Enterprise. Launching of sandbox takes just a few seconds, and then the fully functional dummy environment is available, really well done!

One thing that I found interesting was that it was not possible to start a PowerShell window, or any .NET app. Each try finished with an error, for example:

This application requires one of the following versions of the .NET Framework:.NETFramework,Version=v4.5.2 

The error dialog offers a choice to download the runtime, but the framework installer (correctly) prevents it from being installed, because that or a newer version is already there.

It turns out, that not everyone is affected by this problem. The problem is caused by update KB4495620 which is installed on the host machine. This is a cumulative update for .NET Framework fixing a few vulnerabilities. In order to be able to run .NET apps on Windows 10 Sandbox, uninstall this update and reboot your machine (again to repeat myself – this has to be done on your host and not the sandbox!). After that, powershell.exe and .NET apps will run without issues:

Hello World, RayPack 6.1 (.NET 4.5 app) is running on Windows 10 Sandbox mode.

I hope the problem is going to be fixed by Microsoft soon, until then use this workaround to test Windows 10 Sandbox out.

Posted by Marcin Otorowski in Virtualization, 2 comments

Make VMware Workstation 14 and VIX COM API work together

After installing newest VMware Workstation 14, it turned out that the automation API stopped working with the following error

Retrieving the COM class factory for component with CLSID{COMPONENT-ID} failed due to the following error: 80040154 Class not registered(Exception from HRESULT: 0x80040154(REGDB_E_CLASSNOTREG)).

It seems that the newest version does not install two important COM DLL files (and consequently does not register them): VIXCOM.dll and VIXCOM64.dll. The solution is to copy them over from older installation and register them (as administrator):

regsvr32.exe VIXCOM.dll
regsvr32.exe VIXCOM64.dll

Things start working after this little trick. Alternatively, a full VIX API 1.15 has to be installed (it is available as a separate download from VMware support pages).

The problem has been tackled by our support and is described here
https://raynetgmbh.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360000277786-RSC200351-Executing-Virtual-Machine-Operations-on-VMware-Workstation-14

Note: Since both DLLs can be freely distributed, you can download them from the above link in case you don’t have older installation of VMware Workstation.

Posted by Marcin Otorowski in Virtualization, 1 comment